Saturday, September 26, 2015

"A Miserable Weekend Trip to Bandipur Led to Billion Dollar Company"


We all definitely would have used Ola Cabs, but do we know who is the founder is? How it all started? So let’s introduce Bhavish Aggarwal, the man behind Ola Cabs. Bhavish Aggarwal is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and holds the degree of B.Tech in Computer Science.

A weekend trip to Bandipur turned out to be disaster for Bhavish and his friends, this happened when he booked a rented car for a weekend trip to Bandipur but on the way to Bandipur, the cab driver demanded more fare to travel ahead to Bandipur from Mysore, when Bhavish and his friends decided not to pay the driver the extra fare and continued their journey by bus. This pathetic experience made Bhavish Aggarwal to provide better solution to customers looking for rental cabs.

Bhavish Aggarwal thought of providing convenience, maintaining price transparency and standardizing the cab booking process so with this idea, he started Ola cabs on 3 December 2010. He started Ola cabs by having tie-up with car operators, where he charged the commission for the sales carried and also a nominal fee for using Ola technology platform. This was purely “Pay-for-Performance” model i.e. you pay only for the distance you ride but not more than that.

That was the time when Indian Transportation Industry was inefficient and unorganized. It was identified that the Indian radio taxi market is estimated to be around $6-$9 billion dollars and it is projected to grow by 17 – 20% every year. But the fact was only 4 – 6% of radio taxi market is organized. There was no proper service provided to the customer. Price transparency was the main problem faced by many customers as different operators offered different price bands. This was seen as unseen opportunity by Bhavish Aggarwal and he tapped into the market by standardizing the cab booking charges with the help of technology that can connect to the people at larger and faster ways.

Initially they targeted the corporate professionals, who were eagerly looking for weekend break with their friends and colleagues. The target positioning was a perfect pitch and they could see the raise in demand for their business model in Mumbai and this made them to expand their business to Pune, Bangalore and Delhi.

Today Bhavish Aggarwal is considered to be the youngest & richest entrepreneur in India with the estimate of Rs. 2,385 crore.

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